“Yeah. I guess there was.”
“Without sockets there’s not much in the line of work you can do.”
“Sure isn’t.”
“No wonder your gypsies were being hounded. A group of adults traveling around without plug facilities!” He shook his head. “But why didn’t you get them?”
“That’s just gypsies. We never had them. We never wanted them. I took them because I was by myself, and—well, I guess it was easier.” The Mouse hung his forearms over his knees. “But that was still no reason for them to come and run us out of town whenever we got settled. Once, I remember, they got two gypsies, and killed them. They beat them up till they were half dead, and then cut their arms off and hung them head down from trees to bleed to death—“
“Mouse!” Katin’s face twisted.
“I was only a kid, but I remember. Maybe that’s what made Momma finally decide to ask the cards what to do even though she didn’t believe. Maybe that’s what made us break up.”
“Only in Draco,” Katin said. “Only on Earth.”
The dark face turned up at him. “Why, Katin? Go on, you tell me, why did they do that to us.” No question mark at the end of his sentence. Hoarse outrage instead.
“Because people are stupid, and narrow, and afraid of anything different.” Katin closed his eyes. “That’s why I prefer moons. Even on a big one, it’s hard to get so many people together that that sort of thing happens.” His eyes opened. “Mouse, consider this. Captain Von Ray has sockets. He’s one of the richest men in the universe. And so does any miner, or street cleaner, or bartender, or file clerk, or you. In the Pleiades Federation or in the Outer Colonies, it’s a totally cross-cultural phenomenon—part of a way of considering all machines as a direct extension of man that has been accepted by all social levels since Ashton Clark. Up until this conversation, I would have said it was a totally cross-cultural phenomenon on Earth as well. Until you reminded me that on our strange ancestral home world, some incredible cultural anachronisms have managed to dodder on until today. But the fact that a group of non-socketed gypsies, impoverished, trying to work where there’s no work to do, telling fortunes by a method that they have totally ceased to understand while the rest of the universe has managed to achieve the understanding these same gypsies’ ancestors had fifteen hundred years back—lawless eunuchs moving into a town couldn’t have been more upsetting to the ordinary socketed workingman or woman. Eunuchs? When you plug into a big machine, you call that studding; you wouldn’t believe where that expression came from. No, I don’t understand why it happened. But I do understand a little of the how.” He shook his head. “Earth is a funny place. I was there in school four years, and I had just begun to learn how much of it I didn’t understand. Those of us who weren’t born there probably will never be able to figure it completely. Even in the rest of Draco, we lead much simpler lives, I think.” Katin looked at the card in his hand. “You know the name of this card you swiped?”
The Mouse nodded. “The Sun.”
“You know if you go around pinching cards, they can’t very well show up in the reading. Captain was rather anxious to see this one.”
“I know.” He ran his fingers along the strap of his sack, “The cards were already talking about me coming between Captain and his sun; and I’d just pinched the card from the deck.” The Mouse shook his head.
Katin held the card out. “Why don’t you give it back? While you’re at it, you might apologize for kicking up that fuss.”
The Mouse looked down for half a minute. Then he stood, took the card, and started up the hall.
Katin watched him turn the corner. Then he crossed his arms and dropped his head to think. And his mind drifted to the pale dusts of remembered moons.
Katin mulled in the quiet hall; finally he closed his eyes. Something tugged at his hip.
He opened them. “Hey—“
Lynceos (with Idas a shadow at his shoulder) had come up to him and pulled the recorder out of his pocket by the chain. He had held up the jeweled box. “What’s this—“
“—thing do?” Idas finished.
“You mind giving that back?” The foundations for Katin’s annoyance were laid at their interruption of his thoughts. It was built on their presumption.
“We saw you fooling with it back at the port.” Idas took it from his brother’s white fingers—“Look—“ Katin began.
– and handed it back to Katin. “Thanks!” He started to put it back into his pocket. “Show us how it works—“
“—and what you use it for?”
Katin paused, then turned the recorder in his hand. “It’s just a matrix recorder where I can dictate notes and file them. I’m using it to write a novel.”
Idas said, “Hey, I know what that—“
“—me too. Why do you want to—“
“—have to make one of—“
“—why don’t you just make a psychorama—“
“—is so much easier. Are we—“
“—in it?”
Katin found himself starting to say four things. Then he laughed. “Look, you glorified salt and pepper shakers, I can’t think like that!” He pondered a moment. “I don’t know why I want to write one. I’m sure it would be easier to make a psychorama if I had the equipment, the money, and the connections in a psychorama studio. But that’s not what I want. And I have no idea whether you’ll be ‘in it’ or not. I haven’t begun to think about the subject. I’m still making notes on the form.” They frowned. “On structure, the aesthetics of the whole business. You can’t just sit down and write, you know. You have to think. The novel was an art form. I have to invent it all over again before I can write one. The one I want to write, anyway.”
“Oh,” Lynceos said.
“You sure you know what a novel—“
“—of course I do. Did you experience War—“
“—and Peace. Yeah. But that was a psychorama—“
“—with Che-ong as Natasha. But it was—“
“—taken from a novel? That’s right, I—“
“—you remember now?”
“Um-hm,” Idas nodded darkly behind his brother. “Only”—He was talking to Katin now—“how come you don’t know what you want to write about?”
Katin shrugged.
“Then maybe you’ll write something about us if you don’t know yet what—“
“—can we sue him if he says something that isn’t—“
“Hey,” Katin interrupted. “I have to find a subject that can support a novel. I told you, I can’t tell you if you’re going to be in it or—“
“—what sort of things you got in there anyway?” Ides was saying around Lynceos’ shoulder.
“Huh? Like I said, notes. For the book.”
“Let’s hear.”
“Look, you guys don’t …” Then he shrugged. He dialed the ruby pivots on the recorder’s top, then flicked it to seven. Bear in mind that the novel—no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective—is always a historical projection of its own time.” The voice played too high, and too fast. But it facilitated review. “To make my book, I must have an awareness of my time’s conception of history.”
Idas’ hand was a black epaulet on his brother’s shoulder. With eyes of bark and coral, they frowned, flexed their attention.
“History? Thirty-five hundred years ago Herodotus and Thucydides invented it. They defined it as the study of whatever had happened during their own lives. And for the next thousand years it was nothing else. Fifteen hundred years after the Greeks, in Constantinople, Anna Comnena, in her legalistic brilliance (and in essentially the same language as Herodotus) wrote history as the study of those events of man’s actions that had been documented. I doubt if this charming Byzantine believed things only happened when they were written about. But incidents unchronicled were simply not considered the province of history in Byzantium. The whole concept had transformed. In another thousand years we had reached that century which began with the first global conflict and ended with the first conflict between globes brewing. Somehow the theory had arisen that history was a series of cyclic rises and falls as one civilization overtook another. Events that did not fit on the cycle were defined as historically unimportant. It’s difficult for us today to appreciate the differences between Spengler and Toynbee, though from all accounts their approaches were considered polar in their day. To us they seem merely to be quibbling over when or where a given cycle began. Now that another thousand years has passed, we must wrestle with De Biling and Broblin, 34-Alvin and the Crespburg Survey. Simply because they are contemporary, I know they must inhabit the same historic view. But how many dawns did I see flickering beyond the docks of the Charles while I stalked and pondered whether I held with Saunder’s theory of Integral Historical Convection or was I still with Broblin after all. Yet I have enough—prospective to know that in another thousand years these differences will seem as minute as the controversy of two medieval theologians disputing whether twelve or twenty-four angels can dance on the head of a pin.